


Sarah's First Morning In Canada

by SpunTop



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-02
Updated: 2016-09-02
Packaged: 2018-08-12 13:42:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7936861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpunTop/pseuds/SpunTop
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The title is pretty much a decent description.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sarah's First Morning In Canada

Sarah’s First Morning In Canada

 

Is it the light filtered through the curtains and her eyelids that wakes her first or the muffled sounds of strangers downstairs? Probably the combination. The smell is wrong. The bed is wrong. The place is wrong. Her heart races and her eyes snap open. The ceiling is wrong. Her world feels like a bowl that has been picked up and turned upside down. Herself and the rest of the contents of that bowl feel as though they’ve been brutally dropped hard on the ground.

 

Sarah is in a bed with sheets and a bedspread. How did she sleep between the sheets with her feet trapped like this? She kicks hard as her heart clenches and she feels like crying. Not because of the sheets trapping her feet. But for that indescribable sense of being an insurmountable distance from home.

 

She blinks back tears and rushes out of bed. Despite carpet under her feet, the floor is cold. She goes to the window and everything is so much more wrong. It isn’t familiar brick and mortar that welcomes her. The sun is so bright without the curtain offering protection, it hurts her eyes. It isn’t the pale light of morning of home but this harsh, bright light that feeds her senses opposing truths. How can it be so cold and the sun so bright at the same time? This is making a false advertisement of the weather.

 

A small smile pulls at the corner of Sarah’s mouth. As if the sun were a being capable of false advertising. But she isn’t too happy with it all the same. What she wouldn’t give for a familiar element to this morning. A downcast sky. A diesel engine. School children squawking at each other. Even the cold of this autumn morning lacks the dampness to it that seeps deep into your bones. As much as they complain about the weather, the damp cold is a companion. In the sense of being so heavy in the air that it is near palpable and in the sense of being unpleasant to be around. A companion that has been a near constant in your life that you aren’t entirely willing to give up. Or at least, Sarah isn’t.

 

Sarah rolls her eyes inwardly. What the fuck is wrong with her? She’s getting all soft about the bleeding weather? She’s too old for this shit.

 

She curses herself out and wonders where Felix is sleeping.

 

Her heart skipped another beat. The truth that she is refusing to admit is: she is intimidated and scared and she can’t believe this is the first time it has really hit her that she has left England. She has left London. She might never see it again. She’s never been patriotic but bloody hell. It’s who she is, isn’t it? Who will she be now? She remembers immigration yesterday, at Pearson Airport. She felt a bit indignant when they sat them with the rest of the immigrants and then questioned them. It’s hard to take in. At the time, she almost laughed out loud at herself. She IS an immigrant. Only, she doesn’t want to be here. She still doesn’t know why Mrs. S. insisted they leave. She feels resentment and anger and buried under that is the feeling she wouldn’t admit to fear. Fear of the unknown.

 

She had pictured Canada as a desolate place. But when they had left Pearson, she had been driven out onto the motorway. It was a massive sprawl of lanes unlike anything she had ever seen in London. No walls of buildings and trees to hug her. From her European eyes, it was American and she envisioned a place like the Wonder Years and Roseanne. She is up to her neck in foreign shit and doesn’t know the first thing about getting out of it.

 

What are they doing here?

 

She is supposed to be tough. She isn’t a child. She shouldn’t be having a meltdown over this. Her wounded pride is screaming at her.

 

Sarah draws in long, deep breaths. There isn’t a chance in hell she’s going to bawl like some daft cunt over this. She needs a cup of tea. She walks across the creaky floorboards and heads downtown. This panic attack is officially done with.

**Author's Note:**

> I moved to Toronto when I was 15 years old from London with my sisters. I started watching Orphan Black recently and then binge watched it. It was a bit bizarre some of the overlap with my own life. With some obvious differences. 
> 
> I apologize for being self-indulgent. But I tried to picture how similar and how different her experience was from my own. She would've woken up landing in the Birdwatcher's place in the country. I woke up in an apartment in Parkdale. But I think there would've been some similarities in the experience.


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